Catalogue Raisonne (31 page)

But Barbara was walking through the larger of the Teale Galleries, strolling comfortably, as if she couldn't hear the clanging behind her. Or perhaps it was just someone else's problem. She was strolling down the centre of the gallery, looking to either side, like someone walking down the middle aisle of a mall, taking in the shops, glad to be among them, but not compelled to press her face to the glass. I wasn't qualified to say whether or not she had any understanding of art. But more and more I doubted that she had any
interest
in it. That incuriousness – along with beauty – might have been the source of her power.

I tried to turn on the alarm in the Teale Gallery. I wanted to make her react – startle her at least. She kept walking. Then I realized I'd been misreading the labels below the buttons –
T1
referred to the button above, not below – and I'd been setting off panics in the deserted Pettit Gallery and sculpture corridor. Which ducts was Hans working on today? The thought struck suddenly, but I hadn't been paying attention when he'd asked.

I waited until Barbara was in the middle of the CHOP show – standing in the middle of the room staring at one wall (if she was trying to imitate Walter she wasn't moving her head enough; the
eye
didn't need to stare, just glance at) – and I pushed the button above
T2
. There was a wonderful delay before she moved, like the diagram in the old science textbook that showed the ball at the top of the slide, loaded with potential energy about to become kinetic. She took a step, the green light glowed. She started, her shoulders jumping, and began glancing about for the source of the noise. I'd been there, of course, and knew the harsh jangling – strange to watch someone's reactions to it without being able to hear, seeing just the green glow and the jerky, low-resolution images in black and white, like the motions of a comedian in an old silent film. She jerked her head about, her hair flying after it. She strode on high heels a few steps this way, then that; as if
motion in another direction, any direction, might stop it. She kept coming back to the centre of the room and then striking out on another tack, like someone drawing an asterisk using vectors of her own movement.

It was curious to me that she couldn't stop the sound. There were two ways – known, I would have thought, to anyone who worked at the gallery. First, she could have found an intercom – there was one just around the corner in the lighting panel box – and called security. To see if we'd just lost “Montmorency Falls”, if not just to stop the racket. Or, if you didn't take the alarm seriously, you could simply open an Emergency exit. For some reason – a circuit problem, which had been noted with concern for my four years at least – the sounding of one alarm cancelled the other. And the sound in the stairwell was more muffled, once you got the door closed again.

But Barbara looked helpless. I stared down at her scrambling like an insect in a box. It couldn't have lasted longer than half a minute but it felt painfully protracted, even to me. When she stalked out toward the elevator, so quickly that I lost her on the cameras, I flicked on the Lamont and then the MacMahon alarms ahead of her, pushing Reset on the rooms she'd left. It felt cruel, but I wanted to wind her up to the maximum.

I looked at Frankenstein, standing patiently beside me. He blinked. Not understanding much more of what I was doing than I did, but expressing his bewilderment more eloquently.

Stefan timed his return badly. I'd got clear of the panel, and the elevator doors had just opened, releasing Barbara. She swept past me so fast that I caught only a gust of spicy perfume and a blur of brown-and-blonde. But in that blur, like a freeze-frame, was a snapshot of perfect fury. Rage did a strange thing to her beauty. It clarified and removed it – all the straight lines tightening and becoming rigid, but also retreating behind a thin shell or veil, a slight cold distance – like a Greek head wrapped in cellophane.

“What do you think you're doing down here?” she snapped. “Who's in charge here?” Again, that strange ignorance of gallery basics that had been captured by the camera. No practical outlet for frustration; not even knowing the right person to blast.

She had nothing but her fury, which was frightening enough, even from a few feet away, wondering when it might wheel and find me. This, I saw, beyond the beauty and the clothes and the style and charm – the threat of this, which anybody close to her would feel – I'd felt it once or twice, making mistakes in my gallery daze –
this
is what kept them all in line.
Why don't those old bags tell her to fuck off?
We'd all asked it – post-opening, post-wine, post-coke – packing disgust with the volunteers and their mistress and the gallery into one bored-sounding query. This was why.

Peter:
I wouldn't advise that.
When my hand was on the clock.
Her
clock.

Stefan, even when Barbara began articulating her outrage more precisely, couldn't do much more than say “Yes,” and “Yes, Barbara,” and “I'm sorry,” and “I understand” – and, when she had stopped and stalked back to the elevator, put as much into glowering at me as he could manage. Which with Stefan of course was quite a lot.

The monster snuck a peek at me as I was leaving. Learning. Slowly but surely, learning.

“Hnh?”

The perplexed sound Claudia made in her nose made me slow down and stop for a moment. The breath I took felt like the first breath I'd taken since leaving the gallery, air stopped in my chest as my fingers stretched for the chord. Walking fast, almost running, up to her apartment. Her face at the door strained, not pleased by the interruption. Yet another reason to hurry my story, with her in her paint-stained jeans and T-shirt looking restless on the edge of the couch. The tight uptilt of her jawline: the first line, the main one, if you were sketching her.

“You're saying you believe them now,” she said. “Neale and the other guy . . . Peter?”

“Yes. I think so anyway. Maybe not on every detail. But . . . on the main things, yeah.”
On “Wayward Guest”. On Robert.

“You trust Peter?”

“Oh God, no. Not at all. But like I'm saying – you have to know the people. This particular guy, I think he'd be more comfortable with a big secret than a small lie. Lies are too . . . I don't know . . . messy, maybe.”

Claudia raised her eyebrows, let them fall slowly. This wasn't like playing a chord. When you found a chord, or thought you had, you could tell right away whether it was the right one. So could anyone else listening, even those with bad ears, like ours. But what I was doing now felt less sure and more precise, the method less mysterious but the goal perhaps more so. I
had
left music behind, something I'd often wondered if I could ever completely do. The Chile Dogs' brand of music, anyway. This
did
have more to do with people, people and pictures. Chess, with its black and white patterns and calculable (at least in restrospect) sequences, might have been the precursor. People moved in shifting colours, and their past was no less ambiguous than their present or future. But there was still a sense of trying to understand what they were capable of, working singly, sometimes in combination. It was very tricky – a constantly tricky thing – to decide whether an effect, the picture you were seeing, was due more to someone, or some people, working in concert toward an intention, or whether it was a composite of many individual efforts, criss-crossing and combining and cancelling each other. Tangents. And which ones grazed the circle you could feel containing the picture? And which ones just bypassed it closely? Or cut right through it on their way somewhere else – not tangents at all? Limitless.

Taking another deep breath, I said, “Remember how you said the idea of doing a bunch of forgeries was silly?”

“Mm hm.”

“Well, you're right, it is. But only if you understand the art world. Not if you don't really. And especially not if you think you do when you don't.”

“You've lost me there.”

I could see I had. Her eyes drifting back to the hall, the easel I'd yanked her from at the end of it. This kind of chord seemed to fall apart when you tried to play it for someone else – in which case, chord was definitely the wrong word. Completely. Finally. And yet – and yet
– another person still had to give it a listen and nod, even if vaguely or indulgently. I backtracked a bit to lay out the “Phantom Gallery” idea that had popped into my head (chords not needing their own titles either, just a grunted G or C or F for the bass player). Claudia leaned back at her end of the couch, giving a fair impression of listening patiently. She must have sensed I needed that.

And the story caught her a bit, finally. She was a visual person after all. With the pattern recognition that involved. Concern for composition, balance. Form.

“I still don't get,” she interrupted with a frown, “whether it's to rent out the real things or the fakes. You said the fakes could fill up the empty spaces in the vaults. In which case they might not even have to be very good. But then you also talked about people hanging them on their walls.”

“Did I?” I shook my head briskly, like someone emerging from water, or trying to clear it after a blow. “It might depend on who she's more contemptuous of, Walter or her customers. Or maybe she plans a tier system, like her docents and her dish ladies. The upper tier would get the occasional treat of a real Milne, Leduc, Roberts, Peel – whatever she thought Walter, and so Peter, wouldn't be bothering with for a while – and the lower tier would get a Claudia. So to speak,” I added when her frown deepened.

“The point is,” I went on, “I don't think she's got it all worked out yet. I think she knows her basic direction, but the details she's doing on the fly. Improvising. She's got a lot of energy.”

I was suddenly struck by a horrible spinning image – like a vortex of paper scraps – generated by the thought of everyone simultaneously working out their own chords, pictures, sequences, people. The infinite possibilities and confusion of that. The sheer chaos.

“Wouldn't she be worried about me?” she said. “Telling. Or blackmailing her, or something?”

“She doesn't know you.”

Claudia's face went blank a moment, as if just remembering that. Trust her? a voice reminded me. Then she looked pissed again, her default mood.

“I mean the ‘Claudia' she gets,” she said. “Whoever she finds.”

I chewed my lip, considering it. “I think you have to be a certain size – in her terms – before she even sees you. She wouldn't be able to imagine you as less than ecstatic with your $500 per painting. She might even tell herself she was doing you a favour.”

“She might
be
.”

“Exactly.”

“But why take the risk, I mean. Extra cash?”

“Yeah, that. More because you can, I think. There's a ceiling above you – maybe far above, lots of headroom, but you still don't like it . . . so smash it.” I was guessing now. “And yes, money. Her husband is a psychology professor. She can't run with the people she wants to run with. Not really.”

“Her salary and his. They must make a decent buck.”

“Our decent buck is their minimum wage. And coke. . . .” But this trailed off into inconsequence. I stared into space.

“Do you want some tea?” When she reached over and touched my arm, I noticed my hands were shaking.

As she clinked and clanked in the kitchen, I thought of the picture that had guided me on the way here, driven me here really. A moving picture, like a little film. A wasp, long and yellow and black, with its wings removed, crawling around the bottom and the sides of a white cardboard box. A shoe box maybe. The wingless insect walking without pause, reaching a corner, trying another direction. And then a child's slim fingers going into the box. Curious? Sympathetic? Or just wanting to touch the glowing yellow cylinder, a pet now that it was maimed. But forgetting about the stinger. The fingers smarting back in pain, tipping the box, freeing the wasp to die on the ground. But the picture cropped at the intruding wrists. No way, when I tried to raise my gaze, to see the face – howling, likely – above them.

A neighbour? A relative?
Me?

“Here.” The tea was herbal, chamomile probably though it had been steeped too briefly to be sure. The main effect was of hot water sweetened with honey. After we'd sipped a bit in silence, she said, “It still sounds preposterous to me.”

Where did the strange comfort in that thought come from?

“Well,” she said, “we've got plenty of time anyway. To figure it all out.”

The comfort there was no mystery.
We. Time.